The comparison with the visual arts is apt. Also consider music. When you listen to Bach or Chopin, do you know what it's "about"? Yes, of course you do. Can you explain it to me in words? No, in all likelihood you cannot. You can stammer out your impressions, etc., and tell me how it made you feel, but you probably can't translate the music into useful critical discourse containing an explanation of what the music "meant" or "was about."
Some people (at times I'm one of them) feel frustrated by the inability to validate their experience of music or Mondrian with words that we can write down and initial in the margin. But it's not really fair to experience such frustration. To say that the only "meaning" that matters in art is meaning that is susceptible to paraphrase or easy critical analysis is to define away all art that doesn't lend itself to criticism. (It's like choosing to look for a lost item only where the light is good --it ignores the possibility that the object may be in the dark.)
Of course, a poem may resist understanding because it's badly written, or its thoughts are illogical, or because it tried to convey something that it failed to convey, and this would be a flaw in the poem. But there are poems, like Dylan Thomas and others wrote, that resist understanding because they aren't "meant" to be understood in entirely paraphrasable ways but to be understood as music or visual arts are understood. It's harder to discus such poems, but that doesn't make them flawed. It points to a shortcoming of criticism, not the poem.
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